


black fire's burning bright

by ODed_on_jingle_jangle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disturbing Themes, F/M, Gen, Minor Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Murderers, Non-Explicit Sex, Non-Linear Narrative, Serial Killers, Strangulation, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:40:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21563911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ODed_on_jingle_jangle/pseuds/ODed_on_jingle_jangle
Summary: Sometimes there are things Betty can’t tell other people, so she writes them in her diary instead.Then sometimes there are things that are so wretched, she can’t even write them down.Like the fact that she pushed her face into Jughead’s shoulder watching the footage of Clifford Blossom murdering his son not because she couldn’t stomach it, but because she feared she might burst into peals of laughter seeing Jason’s brains spray from a shattered skullcap. Like the fact that scrubbing the Shady Man’s blood from the floor felt much easier than staying awake during her dreadfully dull history class.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	black fire's burning bright

**Author's Note:**

> So this week I sat my busy ass down to catch up on all my shows, Riverdale included and...I'm not really ecstatic with the Betty-as-a-potential-serial-killer plot, tbh, but the thing is, it's not because I hate the idea itself. I think it's a fascinating concept. I just think Riverdale's execution of that concept thus far has been poor and leaves a lot to be desired. 
> 
> But the concept itself? 
> 
> Oh, no, that's really fun! If Betty can a superhero, a vampire slayer, werewolf hunter, Predator battler and devil summoner, she can absolutely be a serial killer too, lmaooo. So consider this fic some of my self-indulgence in that playground, cause man, yeah, what a neat idea to explore. Having said that, this fic does not follow s3 or s4 continuity, though there are some references to content in those seasons. Also some references to various comic canon. 
> 
> Got the title from a song.

  
Maybe it starts with that itchy, scratchy wig.

Maybe it starts with her father.

Maybe it starts with a simple shard of glass.

Maybe it starts with none of these things, and these little bits along the way are nothing more than keys that unlock the ugliness that lurks inside. One by the one, letting lose every hideous, twisted ism Betty never wanted unleashed but cannot resist in the wake of release.

* * *

Betty’s seen her fair share of gang fights. She spends more time on the Southside now that she’s with Jughead, now that she’s the Serpent Queen to his Serpent King. She’s no longer a stranger to older Serpents scuffling when they stumble out of the Whyte Worm more drunk than anyone ought to be when hopping on a motorcycle, no stranger to friction between the factions when Toledo Serpents spill in now and then, accustomed to gutsy Ghoulies or Gargoyles stirring up trouble over turf. 

Gang fights are always so messy. Chains flailing wildly to strike flesh, broken chunks of concrete smashed to cheeks, the earsplitting cacophony of tire irons clashing together in displays like urban sword fights. Nothing precise about it, not like the boxing matches Archie’s been so interested in lately, where every punch is just as practiced as a ballerina’s pirouette. 

One time, when they’re walking home after a party at Reggie’s they both unwillingly got roped into going to via Archie, Jughead gets jumped by a Ghoulie. 

Betty is shoved out of the way before she can react, uncoordinated from having a little too much of the spiked punch Veronica kept putting in her hands under the insistence that she “lighten up.” She skins her hands and knees on the sidewalk. 

Jughead bites out a curse and and breaks the beer bottle in his hand (also accepted under the unrelenting insistence of Veronica) against the pole of the stop sign. He rounds on the Ghoulie, greeting the switchblade at his stomach with broken glass aimed for the throat. 

Betty is immediately awash with fear for her boyfriend’s safety, but a single thought cuts through the fear, an observation that makes her blood run cold. 

If Jughead were to jam that broken bottle into that guy’s throat, right here, right now, with an offhanded thrust, it would be very messy. The mortal wound probably look like something out of Shark Week. Maybe the bottle would even get stuck in the meat and the blood would spill down the glass in haphazard currents. Or spurt out around it like a spigot with a blockage. 

That this is an observation her brain conjures up for her in a moment she should be punching 9-1-1 into her cellphone is perturbing, to say the least. 

Luckily, she doesn’t have much time to dwell on it, as the Ghoulie backs down. Usually they travel in numbers, this must be a straggler or just a guy who thought he got lucky with some easy prey. He almost trips over himself as he takes off running. 

For a heartbeat it looks like Jughead might chase after him, but he drops the bottle and helps Betty to her feet instead. 

“Are you okay?” 

Is she okay? Are people who are okay make fucked up observations when they’re attacked? When their loved ones are in imminent danger? 

“I’m fine,” she says, exhaling a heavy breath. “Just some scrapes. Are you?” 

Jughead’s shoulders slump in relief. “Lost what was left over of my beer, but it was getting warm and it’s not like I wanted it to begin with.” 

“You acted fast,” she praises, patting his bicep, hoping the affection might bring her back down to normal. 

“Eh. If my family taught me anything good, it’s how to think on my feet,” he huffs, corner of his mouth crooked up in a smirk. 

Betty bobs her head in agreement. That bottle move was all Jones, through and through, Gladys’s two-second fuse and FP’s crude brutality. Jughead was her childhood friend long before he was her boyfriend and over a decade of growing up together has rendered her familiar with the tree from which the apple has fallen. 

“Do you think we should call someone to pick us up?” Betty asks, tone level as she privately prays that she’s no such combination of her own parents. The cross between her mother’s reckless instability and her father’s cold calculation would be nothing less than horrifying. 

“Yeah, maybe just in case. Where there’s one Ghoulie, there’s usually more.” Jughead digs his phone out of his jacket. 

As he punches his password in and starts thumbing through his contacts, Betty’s attention wanders to the glass glinting beneath the light of the streetlamp. She bends forward and traces the sharp edge of one particularly wide shard that’s almost symmetrical, somehow. 

Without thought, she picks it up, gently tucking it into the breast pocket of her sweater.

* * *

Betty forgets why she took it, if there was ever a reason. She wraps it in tissue, tucks it into her purse, and puts its existence out of her mind right up until the moment that same Ghoulie gets Jughead into a motorcycle accident. 

“Are you sure it was the same guy?” she asks, frowning as she watches Archie tweeze grit and gravel out of the road rash on her boyfriend’s back. 

Thankfully that’s all it is— road rash and bruises. But it could’ve been worse. So much worse. Just because it wasn’t doesn’t mean the accident is a non-issue. 

“It wasn’t just him, there were three or four in the truck that ran me off the road. But he was the driver.” Jughead pauses with a grimace as Archie deposits some grit into the tupperware bowl Veronica grabbed from the trailer’s cluttered kitchen. “I know because he has the same skull necklace on as he did the other night.” 

Betty blinks rapidly, readjusts her grip on Jughead’s hand. She doesn’t remember any necklace, but in hindsight, she’d been a little buzzed and it was dark outside. It’s not like she’d been as close to the guy as Jughead was, anyway. 

“You don’t have much in the way of first aid,” Veronica announces, strutting down the dinky hallway with a can in one hand and a small cardboard box in the other. “You’ve got expired bacitracin and Lisa Frank bandaids…?” 

“I have a little sister,” Jughead reminds her drily. “Besides, bacitracin doesn’t expire.” 

“Then what do you call this?” she asks briskly, tapping her manicured fingernail against the expiration date printed near the top of the can. 

“That’s just a suggestion,” Jughead argues. “It’s still good. Antiseptic doesn’t go bad.” 

“It might not hurt you like spoiled milk, but there’s no point in using it,” Veronica insists. “If it goes past this date,” she taps her finger to the can again, “it’s not effective anymore.” 

Archie and Betty exchange eye-rolls as their significant others argue over whether or not antiseptics can go bad and Betty doesn’t bother pointing out that bacitracin isn’t an antiseptic at all, but an antibiotic. The can that may or may not be expired is empty anyway and Archie ends up tending to the raw skin with nothing fancier than soap, water, and paper towel. 

Veronica and Archie stay a bit longer after that. Betty stays until the sun goes down, peppering Jug with kisses, cuddling on the couch, offering him a quick hand job before FP comes back. She spoils him the way he’d spoil her if their roles were reversed and promises to touch up on the paint on the motorcycle in the morning. 

When she leaves, she says it’s because she has homework to finish. It’s not quite the truth.

* * *

Betty is good at finding things. Betty is good at finding people. 

When they were kids, Reggie relentlessly accused her of cheating during hide and seek. She must’ve won just about every game. She never cheated though, she simply excelled at finding people. 

* * *

Skull Necklace Ghoulie sleeps with his mouth open, Betty discovers when she creeps into the bedroom of the duplex he shares with a scraggly, skinny cat. It smells like he hasn’t cleaned the cat’s litter box in awhile, the air saturated with the odor of animal urine. 

Skull Necklace Ghoulie sleeps with his mouth open and without clothes, in nothing but boxers with winking emojis printed on them. Well, the boxers and the necklace. The necklace stays on even as Betty unzips his throat with the sharp edge of the glass shard. 

His eyes fly open, wide in uncomprehending panic. He begins to gurgle as the blood floods forth from the meticulous path the glass took from one ear to the other, and Betty clamps her hand over his mouth, squeezing his nostrils closed with her thumb and index finger. 

He struggles to reach up, as if to pry her off, but his fingers can only twitch as the blood keeps pouring, drenching his pillow and seeping into the dirty, tattered mattress. Betty feels the humid puff of his last breath trapped beneath the skin of her palm. Distantly she thinks that she never meant for it to go this far and yet somehow watching the life trickle out of his eyes feels like the most natural thing in the world. 

Betty isn’t sure how long she stands there, bloodied glass shard in one hand and dead man’s mouth under the other. It’s like time suspends itself for a period and she isn’t even here, isn’t in this room at all. As if nothing has actually occurred beyond her having an uncannily realistic revenge fantasy. 

But eventually the warmth of the skinny, scraggly cat rubbing itself against her ankles jerks Betty out of her stupor. And the body heat of the cat makes it all the more noticeable that the lips her palm rests upon are frigid. 

Skull Necklace Ghoulie has been dead long enough to grow cold and that’s strange because it feels like it couldn’t have been more than ten seconds ago that Betty ended his life— if ending his life is something she did, in fact, do. 

Did she really do that? Didn’t she just come here to scare him? Scare him the way she was scared when he could’ve hurt Jughead? 

She didn’t mean to— or did she? 

That slice in his neck is so precise, so purposeful. Doesn’t look a bit like the urgent sloppiness that would’ve been the butt of a broken bottle or the wild swing of a chunky metal chain. 

The cat keeps rubbing her legs. 

Betty glances down. She can’t smell the litter box anymore. She’s been in here long enough for her nose to become acclimated. 

She looks back to Skull Necklace Ghoulie, blinks at his blank eyes, at the blood speckled plastic skull resting on his sternum. She takes the beaded chain of the necklace and pulls it until she finds the clasp. She releases it with a quiet clink and tucks it into the pocket of her jeans. 

She then wanders from his room, passes a chipped kitchen table with fizzle rocks strewn across its surface. She pours the cat some dry food into a clean bowl and changes out its litter. She drops the shard of glass into the plastic shopping bag she pours the soiled litter into, disposing of both in a dumpster on her somewhat surreal trek back home. 

* * *

“They think a Serpent did it.” 

“Well…it could’ve been, right?” 

“No one’s come forward. Not to me or my dad.” 

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t a Serpent.” 

“I’m not saying it wasn’t, I’m just saying there’s no proof it was and I don’t want more Ghoulies on our back than there already are. Especially if the fight they’re trying to start is over something we didn’t even do.” 

“It’s probably just an excuse more than anything. They’ve been egging the Serpents on for awhile. I mean, they ran you right off the road, Jug.” 

“…you do know it wasn’t me, right?” 

“Of course! Why would you even ask that?” 

“Right, it’s just…I don’t know. I guess it might’ve seemed a little too coincidental that the guy who messed with me more than once turned up dead.”

“Oh.” Betty cups Jughead’s face in both hands, sighing through her nose as she tenderly strokes her thumbs along his cheekbones. “You don’t have to worry about that. I know you. You’re not a monster.” 

“After everything that happened with your dad, I wouldn’t blame you for being wary,” he says, gaze gentle, touched with a hint of worry. 

Betty chews her lip, slides her hands from Jughead’s face to his chest, and restlessly picks at the neckline of his shirt. 

“When I was a kid, my dad used to be the person I felt safest with,” Betty admits. “I never could’ve guessed what he actually was in the dark. And it’s not like my mom was ever my confidant, but these days she’s kind of spiraling, so yeah…I guess I am wary, lately. But not of you, Jug. I know you’d never do this, I know you’d never hurt someone unless you had to.” 

She only wishes she could say the same of herself. 

(or maybe she doesn’t and that’s the scary part) 

* * *

Betty keeps taking out the necklace. She can’t help herself. She takes it out of its hiding place and traces the skull with her fingertips over and over. One time she smashes the pad of her thumb into its plastic grin so hard that the impressions of its teeth are left bruised into her skin. 

Sometimes she draws her drapes closed, pushes her stool under the knob of her door and wears the necklace without any clothes. Stands in front of the mirror and watches the blood-specked skull dangle between her naked breasts, finds her hand between her legs as warm and damp as that last breath she contained beneath her palm. 

By the time she climaxes she’s usually sobbing, but sometimes she’s laughing. Sometimes the sobs turn to laughter along the way, or else the laughter turns to sobs. 

* * *

Sometimes she just can’t resist and she puts it on first thing in the morning, wears it the whole day tucked safely under the pastel pinks or heart-dotted patterns of her cozy sweaters. 

(shh don’t tell) 

* * *

The latest addition to the River Vixens is a perky, petite freshman by the name of Lottie Little who bubbles with vim and severely overestimates her abilities. Betty isn’t even sure why Cheryl let her join and she can’t ask because she’s out sick. Lottie shows off like a peacock in mating season and nearly kicks Betty in the face as she cartwheels all over the gymnasium. She insists she’s stronger than she looks, that she can handle being on the bottom of the pyramid. 

Except when it actually comes down to it, she isn’t. Betty isn’t in the formation when it happens. She’s by the bleachers, gulping from her water bottle when Lottie begins to wobble and quake. Abruptly, she capsizes, knocking into Toni and unbalancing Nancy, who’s braced on Toni’s shoulders. The whole formation falls apart in domino effect. 

One second Veronica is at the top of the pyramid, standing precariously on Nancy’s back mid-flamingo pose, the next she’s sailing toward the floor. Her startled shriek echoes through the gym and she hits the floor with a solid thwack that Betty swears she can feel beneath her sneakers. 

She takes off running and shoves aside the bodies that dare get in her way, throwing herself down beside Veronica’s prone form. 

“V?” Betty asks, hands hovering uncertainly as her friend gapes up at her, eyes wide and open mouth quivering.

Veronica’s lips come together and separate with the softest of pops, as if she’s trying to form words but can’t get them out. Her gaze drifts in Betty’s direction but it doesn’t actually actually focus on her and that’s when Betty notices the blood. A small pool spreading wider at the back of Veronica’s head, raven strands swallowed by wine dark red. 

“Oh, oh, oh, s—someone call 9-1-1!” Betty hears herself shouting. 

Even in this moment, when Betty’s hands are shaking and her voice stutters as she repeatedly asks if Veronica can hear her, or look at her, or please stay still in case of neck injury, another observation pierces her awareness. 

That as fucked up as it is, as much as she does not want to be seeing Veronica’s blood right now, she is irresistibly drawn to its deep, rich color. 

* * *

It isn’t super serious. A sprained ankle and a mild concussion. Veronica gets some stitches and an air cast she wrinkles her nose at for clashing with everything she owns. Betty promises to keep her spot warm on the squad and Archie carries her textbooks around for the next couple weeks like the dutiful boyfriend he is. 

All things considered, Veronica has been through much worse. But Betty can’t forget the fear that gripped her throat when she swore she could feel the weight of Veronica smacking the hard, lacquered floor right beneath her feet. Can’t erase the snapshot of Veronica’s wide, shocked eyes as they stared right past her. 

Maybe it would be different if Lottie apologized, though she never does. Not to Veronica, not to any of the Vixens. She insists it wasn’t her fault and tries to pin the whole thing on Toni. 

It’s these things Betty is thinking about when she is alone with Lottie in the locker room. She thinks about these things until the rage burns in her chest and her nails sink deep into the meat of her palms. 

She should let it go. She should let it go. She should let it go. 

Betty takes a deep breath and undresses, tugging her skirt down her hips and pulling off her top. 

“Ew,” Lottie sasses, a couple lockers down. “What a creepy necklace.” 

Betty freezes, looks down to the skull that hangs against her sports bra, stares into the carved sockets of its empty gaze, rimmed with the rusty specks of dried blood. 

Betty doesn’t recall how she went from looking into the skull’s sockets to looking into Lottie’s eyes reflected back at her in the mirror on the wall, brilliant blue eyes as wide and shocked as Veronica’s were when she hit the floor. Betty’s hands are closed around her throat. Her pulse throbs against Betty’s skin, this choked sound tumbling past her teeth. 

Betty tightens her grip to a vise, electric currents crackling through her as the knobs of Lottie’s vertebrae press into her flesh. The slim tube of chapstick rolls out of Lottie’s fingers as she reaches back, clawing desperately at Betty’s wrists. Some part of Betty, somewhere, screams for her to stop.

But the part of her that screams _stop, stop, stop,_ is snuffed out by the sensation of Lottie writhing in her grasp as she nearly lifts her off the ground. Lottie Little lives up to her last name, as slender and delicate as a newborn fawn. Betty must have at least thirty pounds on her as hard as Lottie tries, scratching and pulling, hitting, she simply doesn’t have the power to dislodge her. 

Watching it in the mirror almost makes it feel like it isn’t happening. Or at least, that Betty isn’t doing it. That she’s watching someone else with her hands around this girl’s throat, watching someone else squeeze until Lottie’s face swells and reddens like an heirloom tomato, hot tears spilling from frantic eyes. 

Betty is aware of her breasts pushing into Lottie’s back as she squeezes, of honey tresses nearly skimming her lips as Lottie feebly attempts to toss her head. Her windpipe is firm under Betty’s unrelenting hands, her skin flushed hot. Another choked sound leaves her lips, nails harmlessly grazing over Betty’s arms as her desperate attempts to claw her off grow sluggish with fatigue.

Betty peers intently into Lottie’s eyes as the life drains out of them in the mirror glass. Her hands drop to her sides. Her slack weight slumps back into Betty, thin stream of urine trickling down to her cotton candy crew socks. 

Betty should be many things. Exhilarated isn’t one of them. But exhilaration is what she feels most of all, heart soaring, blood on fire, a perverse estrus burning between her legs. 

She drags Lottie to an empty shower, turns the faucet on and dumps her against the tile. Her body makes this sound as it hits that reminds Betty of the noise hamburger meat makes when her mother drops it onto the cutting board. 

People slip in the shower all the time. It’s not unfeasible that this giddy, overexcited puppy of a person who couldn’t stop cartwheeling for five minutes would do something stupid on slippery tile. After all, she was known for running poolside despite the many signs posted warning against it. 

Betty pulls the vinyl curtain closed and returns to the lockers. The toe of her shoe catches something on the floor, sending it rolling. Betty glances down. The tube of chapstick Lottie dropped. 

Cherry cola flavor. 

* * *

“This is awful.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Lottie could be a little shit, but she didn’t deserve to die. No one deserves to die.”

“Right. No matter how nasty she could be, it’s still a tragedy. She was only fourteen.” 

“This town is cursed, I swear.” 

“Bet you one day Hell’s gonna realize it’s missing a level, open up and swallow Riverdale whole.” 

“For sure. Probably starting with the Blossom estate.” 

“I heard that, Pleb.” 

* * *

Sometimes Betty applies coat after coat of cherry cola chapstick. Covers her lips layer by layer until they’re even stickier than melted gum on school bus seats. She’ll press them together and savor the taste, sparks she knows she shouldn’t feel flying through every fiber of her being. 

(hush, hush, no one needs to know)

* * *

She wears the chapstick to the trailer once when she knows she and Jughead have the place to themselves. She barely makes it over the threshold before she’s smashing her mouth to his so hard their teeth clack. She kisses him all the way to the couch, hungrily tearing at his clothes. 

“Hello to you too, Betts,” he murmurs against her mouth, bemused but not displeased. 

She returns the greeting by plunging her tongue between his teeth, straddling him before she can even fumble his fly open. Then Jughead’s hands are on her hips, his giddy goblin grin beaming in the dim light of the kitchen’s flickering bulb. Her frenzied fingers manage to pry open his fly without breaking the zipper, and he’s already half hard. 

Everything is going the way it’s supposed to go until Betty’s tongue swipes her lips and she gets a mouthful of the cherry cola taste she hadn’t completely managed to kiss away on Jughead. Then something happens, she’s not quite sure what, but she checks out of the moment. 

She just blanks. 

Her brain black screens like a phone with a dying battery and when she does snap back into the present, her hands are wrapped around Jughead’s neck and his grin is gone, replaced by a worried frown. 

“Uh, Betty?” 

“O-Oh! Crap, Jug, I’m sorry.” She immediately lets go, jerking her hands back as though his skin is scalding. 

“No, no, Betty it’s okay! You just, uh…you kinda left me for a minute there.” 

She gulps heavily, tries to swallow back the taste of cherry cola that suddenly coats the inside of her throat like Chloraseptic from the pharmacy. 

“I did, um. I guess I just got ahead of myself…” 

“You know if you wanna try stuff like that, I’m not opposed,” he says softly, almost shyly, tentatively smiling up at her. 

“No?” Betty asks, rocking her hips in an attempt to really feel him, to be here and not wherever it was she went. 

“Not at all,” he breathes, readjusting his grip on her hips. “We just have to talk about it first, okay?” 

Betty masks her unease with an agreeable smile. 

* * *

Sometimes there are things Betty can’t tell other people, so she writes them in her diary instead. 

Then sometimes there are things that are so wretched, she can’t even write them down. 

Like the fact that she pushed her face into Jughead’s shoulder watching the footage of Clifford Blossom murdering his son not because she couldn’t stomach it, but because she feared she might burst into peals of laughter seeing Jason’s brains spray from a shattered skullcap. Like the fact that scrubbing the Shady Man’s blood from the floor felt much easier than staying awake during her dreadfully dull history class. 

Wretched things like the things she did to the secret stalker she’d garnered from Greendale during her short lived cam-girl days. How her secret stalker is a person who doesn’t exist anymore. How the coda of his existence was one of driving forces behind them being so short lived, because the release she found in camming couldn’t compare to the rapture she found in plunging her thumbs into the eyes he worshiped her through. 

(moist give under her thumbs’ direct thrust, slick squelching sound, warm ooze spilling over her skin) 

* * *

“Hey, Betty.” 

She glances up from her _Blue and Gold_ draft to offer Archie a smile. 

“Hey. How’s it going?” 

“It’s, uh— it’s going.” Archie bobs his head, swallows. 

He seems off. Distracted. Betty frowns and folds her arms. 

“Is something wrong?” 

Archie shrugs, lowering his eyes to the desk. “Not really.” 

“Archie,” Betty prompts, getting up from her seat and poking him in the forearm. “Come on. What’s up?” 

“It’s…” He gives himself a shake and looks back to her. “It’s probably nothing. I’m probably overthinking it.” 

“Okay,” Betty says evenly, nodding slow. “So can I help you figure out what you think you’re overthinking?” 

“Alright, so you know Ms. Kandinsky? The art teacher?” 

“Yeah?” Betty raises a brow. “Is she failing you?” 

“No…I think she, um.” Archie swallows and anxiously kneads at the back of his neck. “I’m kinda getting this vibe that she likes me. That she's, like, interested in me.” 

Betty gasps. 

“But maybe not!” Archie backtracks quickly. “Maybe I’m just reading it wrong! She hasn’t— she’s just really friendly with me, you know? Ms. Kandinsky gives me a lot of compliments, sometimes she winks at me. And she’s touchy feely, I guess. I mean she’s squeezed my shoulders before and today she hugged me after class let out…”

“Hugged you?” Betty echoes. “I don’t think you’re overthinking it, Arch. You should report her.” 

He gives a gruff jerk of the head, nose wrinkling. “No way. I can’t do that. Look, the whole school— the whole town —knows about what happened with me and Geraldine. If this gets out, it’s just going to bring all that up again and it’s going to be ten times worse. I’ll be known as the Cougar Hunter or the Teacher Chaser until I graduate.” 

“None of that was your fault—“ 

“—but it would be my fault if I got some lady fired from her job just because she’s extra friendly and I took it the wrong way.” Archie runs his hands through his hair. “It’s nothing. Can we drop it? Please?” 

“Well okay,” Betty reluctantly concedes. 

“Don’t say anything to Ron or Juggie, either, okay?” he pleads, nervously rubbing his lips together. “They’ve both got a lot going on right now. You do too, Betty,” he adds apologetically as he backpedals toward the door. “I’m sorry I mentioned it, it’s really nothing.” 

* * *

Betty is a pretty good backyard mechanic. She knows her way around a car, that’s for sure. She could probably even show some of those guys at the Mantles’s dealership a thing or two. These days her vehicular skills are possibly secondary to her sleuthing, but sometimes these are skill sets that compliment one another. 

It doesn’t take her more than five minutes to learn that Ms. Kandinsky’s car is the ’97 Chrysler Neon parked in the back. 

It doesn’t take her more than ten to sabotage the brakes. 

* * *

Betty doesn’t really remember the walk to the art room, from the auditorium where the school is gathered to hear Weatherbee confirm the news that Ms. Kandinsky was killed in a fatal car crash. It must be a walk she completes purely on autopilot. 

She pushes any concern she might’ve felt at that out of her mind as she takes a purposeful step over the threshold. She winds around tables that display students’ kiln baked clay sculptures. Betty takes a seat in Ms. Kandinsky’s cushioned office chair and swipes the red delicious apple off her desk. 

Betty bites into it, relishing the sweet juice that squirts between her teeth and drips drown her wrist in foamy, sticky rivulets. 

**Author's Note:**

> Love you just a little too much.


End file.
